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“You better not be screwing with me, partner,” Jimmy says.
“By making a trip all the way out to you I don’t need to make? In what world?”
Jimmy tells Mickey to meet him at the Candy Kitchen in Bridgehampton, Jimmy’s favorite diner in the area, good enough to be the kind of breakfast joint you see every couple of blocks in the city, one with homemade ice cream, too. Cash only. Old-school.
Jimmy is waiting in a booth in an otherwise empty back room, the place having thinned out the way it always does in the late morning. Mickey is wearing baggy blue jeans and a black short-sleeved polo shirt with a logo Jimmy doesn’t recognize. ANEVER FORGETbaseball hat. As usual, he orders like he’s going to the chair: eggs and bacon and home fries and a stack of pancakes on the side.
Jimmy tells him about his night.
“When’s the last time you took a bullet?” Mickey says.
“Been a while.”
“Still feel the same?”
“What do you think?”
“Guy shoots you and not her. How does that figure?”
“I will make sure to ask him when I find him,” Jimmy says.
Mickey reaches down into the ancient leather satchel he has with him, a gift from Jimmy about a thousand or so years ago, places a notebook on the table between them, Crime Scene Log written in Magic Marker on the cover.
The book is about six inches long, maybe four wide—that size so it can fit into the side pocket of police pants. Something else that’s old-school. Nowadays, Jimmy knows, the notes from a crime scene are typed into an electronic copy of the report. Just not back in the day, when you wrote it all down in great detail by hand if you were doing your job, usually the junior officer on the scene, and then the most relevant pages would be torn out of the book and copied again into the detectives’ case file.
Mickey tells it his way, at his own speed, like always.
“Charlie Culligan was the junior officer on the day in question,” he says. “The senior guy was Ernie Gottlieb, now deceased. They’re the ones who caught the case.”
Jimmy opens the notebook. Mickey taps the page with a stubby finger, the name he wants Jimmy to see clearly written at the bottom.
“As luck would have it, I ran into Charlie the other day. He’s about six months from putting in his papers. I told him I was with you, what you got going, not just the thing with the trial but the other thing. And he tells me about this.”
The name at the bottom of the page is Joe Champi’s.
“What washedoing there?”
“That’s the part that jogged Charlie’s memory,” Mickey says. “The weird part of the piece. Champi was assigned to Queens that day. But then when they find the bodies, Champi is right behind them. Or maybe ahead of them, and just takes a walk around the block to make it look as if he’s behind them.”
Mickey taps the Crime Scene Log again.
“You don’t have to read the rest of it. All the shit about the medical examiner and the ‘need to know’ from other people in the building and what the kid said.”
He slathers the pancakes with syrup and cuts into them as he keeps talking.
“There’s just the one mention of the guy. Charlie Culligan says Champi told him he was on his way over the Queensboro when he heard the call and turned his car around because he said it sounded like fun.”
“Fun,” Jimmy says.
“Just telling you what Charlie remembers him saying.”
Jimmy quickly leafs through the rest of the book now, closes it finally, looks over at Mickey Dunne.
“So it must have slipped his mind that Champi showed up at his apartment the day his old man shot that girl and then shot himself,” Jimmy says.
“Imagine that,” Mickey Dunne says.
Fifty-Six
